happy friday!

I just finished the most strange and wonderful book this morning, Michael Chabon's The Yiddish Policemen's Union. I wasn't in love with Kavalier and Clay, so I didn't rush to pick it up and got it actually only out of desperation as they'd closed off the fiction section of the SFPL to move it all downstairs and there was nothing else. But it was great in the way that Jonathan Lethem's Motherless Brooklyn was great and Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections was great...

all those big boys and their big books, they bite off such large chunks of the world. Mysticism, religion, faith, noir, and a most unusual language all its own. And I am left to wonder what all these hours and words add up to...how to best proceed with my own work which, let's be honest, has always been trying to embrace too much of the world and too many voices. Multiplicity, borderlines, the random action, the long backstory. I am not one, writing wise, for straight lines and simple stories. It is safe to say you will never find my writing in the New Yorker. I know who I am.

I've got to type up my first submission for the new year's writing resolution pact and send it off to snowy Boston. Somehow I forgot that if we finish the year out we are going to get matching tattooes...

It's a restaurant story this part, but the next part of the story refuses to take shape. It balks after four or five re-starts, an angry line cook descending into bad habits while my lovelorn pastry chef sighs patiently over her perfect man and my gay manager stares down another glass of something waiting for reckognizeable love. Anthony Bourdain it ain't, but I have been trying to write these stories for long time and it's a lot easier when you are in a restaurant, squeezing past each other all the time, forming and reforming strange alliances, meeting the demands of the day with what grace you can muster.

This week has been strange and long, pastry bending once again to accommodate the work of others, which is fine, claro, but more juggling. Sometimes you don't sell a dessert for three days straight and then on the fourth you're suddenly shorthanded at the end of lunch service because it was all anyone seemed to want that day. Chances are whenever you think tonight will be just like last night that is not going to happen at all. When you wouldn't mind getting out of work early because you have an evening full of appointments, you'll stay late. You'll realize that there really are five ways of doing math because everyone sees things differently. You try to be always consistent and then the rule changes.

Consistency is hard, maybe one of the hardest things.